Man, those were some good shows. Ones I watched and enjoyed
Firefly Greg the Bunny Dark Angel Keen Eddie The Tick Andy Richter Controls the Universe
With the exception of Dark Angel they were all great; Dark Angel was great in season #1 but lost all sense of itself in season #2 and was unsurprisingly killed.
The one I really cannot forgive is Firefly. Ratings were good, if not great, and you had only to watch one episode (*any* episode) to see that it was quality stuff.
I used to play that game all the time. Good stuff.
As for Gaim, I've got nothing worthwhile to say. Pidgin isn't a bad name, but libpurple is. What's wrong with libpidgin? I know, it's not tied to the GUI anymore. Big deal. Nobody who is looking for the library Gaim^H^H^H^Hpidgin uses is going to think of "purple."
Hopefully this is the last name change for Gaim. Any name is fine if it is used for long enough.
On my 2G flash drive I have Debian installed on an encrypted filesystem. That way I don't have to use that Windows shit and I can have a relatively secure system with all my settings just the way I like them.
I have packaged RPM and DEB. Yes, doing a.deb right is harder. It's an area that could use improvement. I always prefer to put the burden of complexity on those who are most likely to be competent. Packagers can handle complexity much better then end users can handle broken packages.
As for smart: I was not familiar with it before now. A read through the FAQ suggests that it could be very good... but until I see it handling the kind of situations I know apt can handle I wont be convinced.
As I have said elsewhere: You can get one package *format* to rule them all, but never one package *manager*. And, even if you got both, you would not be able to interchange packages between distributions due to depends issues.
It might, *might*, be possible to get one package format, but only if someone creates and maintains the package namespace.
If I want my package to depend on libpng 1.2 header files, is that libpng-dev, libpng-devel, libpng-headers, png-library-developement...?
And it's not just the format of the names, but the names themselves. What is the package "gift"? Is it the GNU Image Finder Tool or the GNU Internet File Transfer metapackage? In Debian it's the latter and the former is gnuift, but only because it's one organization which can decide and agree to call GnuIFT things gnuift and giFT things gift.
Versions are just as bad. Deciding what a package version number means is critical to deciding what its depends are, but nobody can agree on versions. Are distro-modified versions of programs really the same version as the stock upstream? How do you handle compile time options... in the version, or in the package name? Centralized control can guide these things, but with just one package format you can't have central control.
When there is no central control of package repositories, which is what people who talk about a single package format usually want, someone has to resolve these kinds of issues. Otherwise there is no point in a common format... packages from one distro still would not install on another due to dependancy issues.
Would a single format be nice? Sure. But it would also be pointless. If everybody used one format we'd STILL have to create packages for specific distros unless and until the larger issues of namespace and version management are resolved. Until then there is just no gain in a common format.
You too? I do this with Debian. Works very nicely unless I'm tracking unstable, in which case I run into occasional brokenness when depends in sid are in flux. But in testing, no problems.
It greatly helps when doing support on a mailing list or IRC. Someone says "I'm having trouble with foo." And, though I've never heard of it before, I have it installed and can investigate their problem right away. Fun.
"I would like all of that to change. I would like for the Core/Extras distinction to go away, and instead be replaced by the idea of a Fedora Universe, which is a giant pile of packages that are blessed by Fedora, and any subset of those packages that produces a functioning OS can be called Fedora. "
This sounds an awful lot like how Debian has worked for years.
"Dependencies should be packages that are required in order for another to run, not packages that will merely enable additional functionality. In this case -- the prime function of evince is to view documents, which isn't significantly enhanced by having a file browser present.
Debian's Recommends: field handles this nicely and has done so for years.
Once again Fedora is playing package-catch-up to Debian. In another year or so they'll reach parity with Debian circa 2001, by my estimation.
So here's the question: Why use RPM? Even if you use RPM, why stick with yum? DPKG is as good or better and the apt system is years ahead. Must we really wait while Fedora/Red Hat incrementally unsuck yum and RPM when there is an excellent solution tested, proven and working today?
It's just you. How about fixing that symlink, eh? That should be trivial. And when you're done email Google and let them know that it broke under your setup and what the fix was.
If you need help irc.freenode.net and ask in ##linux where I promise no one will laugh.
I use two complementary password generation schemes: (1) I pick a word or pair of words and convert them to 31337. Example: supersecure->sp3rs3cur3. This is 10 chars long, which is Good Enough for a commonly rotated password, easy to remember but hard to guess. (2) I choose a phrase, such as a quote I like, and use the whole thing, For a while my root password was: myvoiceismypasswordverifyme. Now, technically that's not very secure because it's all lower case letters. But due to the length the amount of time it would take to crack is quite high. Again, good for a commonly rotated password.
For added security I use method 2 with method 1. Here's a secure password I no longer use: Iseemt0behavingtremend0usdifficultywithmylifestyle ! (Uppercase I intentional; exclemation point included.)
Except that 320 is half of 640 and 240 is half of 480. Yes, I know it's technically a quarter of VGA but it still makes no sense and is therefore hard to remember.
I had a similar experience with the YellowMachine. It was advertised as 1TB RAID, but the fine print reads "on some models" and the ones I could actually find only gave 650G in RAID5 configuration. No big deal. But it's slow. SLOW. It's got an ARM processor that runs at 100 bogomips and it has 64M of RAM.Mounting is slow. ls is slow. I got it to store media files but I find I can't play mp3s from it unless I tell my player to cache the whole song (and forget about crossfade). It came with telnetd running and no ssh, but fortunately it was based on Debian Woody so fixes are easy. And boy has it required a number of fixes.
I'm thinking of doing something like you did--copying critical configuration info off of it and reusing its md in a faster x86 box.
True. Do you have any suggestions? As an advocate of libertarian-socialist type society/economics I would dearly like to be able to tell people approxamently what I think without needing to write them a book
As it happens I misread the OP so my comments are off base.
But nevertheless, the objections stand. WRT why the other site is implicitly better... it's the same reason I'd call a the GIMP better than Photoshop. It may not actually surupass it yet, but the openness makes it all worthwhile.
Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.
Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.
Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.
What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.
Now, qyuickly! You will be timed: What was the significant event in Buffy season 6 episode 12?! Go go go! With tvtome I could have looked this up (given my broadband) in under 60 seconds. TV.com/does not know/! What;s more, I found that half the links in the Buffy articles linked to Charmed. WTF?
Anyway, I hooked one into my system for a while and ripped images of old DOS disks I had lying around so as to presere them for the future. But one day I turned the power to my system back on after an outage and there was a flash of light, white smoke and the sweet smell of burnt silicon. The only thing that fried was the 5 1/4 floppy drive, so I count myself lucky.
When composing an email in Thunderbird in Windows, I'm accustomed to highlighting a URL then pressing CTRL-L and ENTER rapidly to create a hyperlink. In Linux, that doesn't work because the CTRL-L dialog box doesn't come up fast enough.
This is entirely because of GTK2 and pango. GTK2 is slow, pango is *realy* slow. If those can be optimized or replaced most GUI-speed issues would clear up (at least in GTK apps).
I was under the impression that X's slowness was due to it's aging and impossible-to-change-without-a-complete-rewrite client/server architecture.
This is a common misconception. In fact the biggest problem with X, until recently, was the glacially slow pace of develoment. This problem is essentially solved now since it was almost entirely due to the XFree86 people (and they are, thankfully, no longer in charge).
The client/server architecture of X actually causes essentially zero performance problems when the display and video card are on the same machine. You may have your DISPLAY setting set to localhost:0.0 and that may be causing X to use TCP instead of local domain sockets (but probably not). If it is, set it to:0.0 and see if that makes a difference.
Also, try changing your WMs settings, switching your WM, updating/tweaking your driver, or getting a non-crappy video card. Any of these may solve your problem
Previous slashdot discussions of X (see any story about Y-Windows) have generated massively detailed threads where experts have explained why X is not fundamentally broken. I wont try to regurgitate that stuff here since I'd only do it badly. You are free to go look...
Which is great unless you're running testing or unstable. With testing you can get away with it if it's not a cirical production machine (ie, you can aford to have it broken for a few hours nw and then) but if it's anything but an experimental box that's suicide with sid.
aptitude -t stable upgrade is much safer. However, if you run a mix of newer software from e.g. sid you could find yourself downgraded.
Slashdot Mirror
Man, those were some good shows. Ones I watched and enjoyed
Firefly
Greg the Bunny
Dark Angel
Keen Eddie
The Tick
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
With the exception of Dark Angel they were all great; Dark Angel was great in season #1 but lost all sense of itself in season #2 and was unsurprisingly killed.
The one I really cannot forgive is Firefly. Ratings were good, if not great, and you had only to watch one episode (*any* episode) to see that it was quality stuff.
Ahh, DragonRealms! High five!
I used to play that game all the time. Good stuff.
As for Gaim, I've got nothing worthwhile to say. Pidgin isn't a bad name, but libpurple is. What's wrong with libpidgin? I know, it's not tied to the GUI anymore. Big deal. Nobody who is looking for the library Gaim^H^H^H^Hpidgin uses is going to think of "purple."
Hopefully this is the last name change for Gaim. Any name is fine if it is used for long enough.
My preference?
Some say puppetman has been seen having upside down anal sex with retarded newborn goats.
If wikipedia has taught me nothing else, it has taught me to ask this question: Can you provide a citation to prove that?
I cannot name any but it took me about five minutes to set up my system such that any dos/windows executable that is chmod'd +x and invoked will
/usr/bin/cli (part of mono)
if it's DOS-only launch with DOSbox
if it's GUI-capable launch with wine
if it's a CLI program launch with
In another minute I can make batch files work. None of this required any configuration that couldn't be present by default.
This is completely doable today and yesterday, it's just not being done.
/opt is for losers!
On my 2G flash drive I have Debian installed on an encrypted filesystem. That way I don't have to use that Windows shit and I can have a relatively secure system with all my settings just the way I like them.
I have packaged RPM and DEB. Yes, doing a .deb right is harder. It's an area that could use improvement. I always prefer to put the burden of complexity on those who are most likely to be competent. Packagers can handle complexity much better then end users can handle broken packages.
As for smart: I was not familiar with it before now. A read through the FAQ suggests that it could be very good... but until I see it handling the kind of situations I know apt can handle I wont be convinced.
As I have said elsewhere: You can get one package *format* to rule them all, but never one package *manager*. And, even if you got both, you would not be able to interchange packages between distributions due to depends issues.
It might, *might*, be possible to get one package format, but only if someone creates and maintains the package namespace.
If I want my package to depend on libpng 1.2 header files, is that libpng-dev, libpng-devel, libpng-headers, png-library-developement...?
And it's not just the format of the names, but the names themselves. What is the package "gift"? Is it the GNU Image Finder Tool or the GNU Internet File Transfer metapackage? In Debian it's the latter and the former is gnuift, but only because it's one organization which can decide and agree to call GnuIFT things gnuift and giFT things gift.
Versions are just as bad. Deciding what a package version number means is critical to deciding what its depends are, but nobody can agree on versions. Are distro-modified versions of programs really the same version as the stock upstream? How do you handle compile time options... in the version, or in the package name? Centralized control can guide these things, but with just one package format you can't have central control.
When there is no central control of package repositories, which is what people who talk about a single package format usually want, someone has to resolve these kinds of issues. Otherwise there is no point in a common format... packages from one distro still would not install on another due to dependancy issues.
Would a single format be nice? Sure. But it would also be pointless. If everybody used one format we'd STILL have to create packages for specific distros unless and until the larger issues of namespace and version management are resolved. Until then there is just no gain in a common format.
You too? I do this with Debian. Works very nicely unless I'm tracking unstable, in which case I run into occasional brokenness when depends in sid are in flux. But in testing, no problems.
It greatly helps when doing support on a mailing list or IRC. Someone says "I'm having trouble with foo." And, though I've never heard of it before, I have it installed and can investigate their problem right away. Fun.
"I would like all of that to change. I would like for the Core/Extras distinction to go away, and instead be replaced by the idea of a Fedora Universe, which is a giant pile of packages that are blessed by Fedora, and any subset of those packages that produces a functioning OS can be called Fedora. "
This sounds an awful lot like how Debian has worked for years.
"Dependencies should be packages that are required in order for another to run, not packages that will merely enable additional functionality. In this case -- the prime function of evince is to view documents, which isn't significantly enhanced by having a file browser present.
Debian's Recommends: field handles this nicely and has done so for years.
Once again Fedora is playing package-catch-up to Debian. In another year or so they'll reach parity with Debian circa 2001, by my estimation.
So here's the question: Why use RPM? Even if you use RPM, why stick with yum? DPKG is as good or better and the apt system is years ahead. Must we really wait while Fedora/Red Hat incrementally unsuck yum and RPM when there is an excellent solution tested, proven and working today?
You owe me a new keyboard.
You forgot about Mindawn and also LSongs. SongBird is nice, but that space is not empty.
It's just you. How about fixing that symlink, eh? That should be trivial. And when you're done email Google and let them know that it broke under your setup and what the fix was.
If you need help irc.freenode.net and ask in ##linux where I promise no one will laugh.
I use two complementary password generation schemes:
e ! (Uppercase I intentional; exclemation point included.)
(1) I pick a word or pair of words and convert them to 31337. Example: supersecure->sp3rs3cur3. This is 10 chars long, which is Good Enough for a commonly rotated password, easy to remember but hard to guess.
(2) I choose a phrase, such as a quote I like, and use the whole thing, For a while my root password was: myvoiceismypasswordverifyme. Now, technically that's not very secure because it's all lower case letters. But due to the length the amount of time it would take to crack is quite high. Again, good for a commonly rotated password.
For added security I use method 2 with method 1. Here's a secure password I no longer use: Iseemt0behavingtremend0usdifficultywithmylifestyl
You get the idea.
Except that 320 is half of 640 and 240 is half of 480. Yes, I know it's technically a quarter of VGA but it still makes no sense and is therefore hard to remember.
I had a similar experience with the YellowMachine. It was advertised as 1TB RAID, but the fine print reads "on some models" and the ones I could actually find only gave 650G in RAID5 configuration. No big deal. But it's slow. SLOW. It's got an ARM processor that runs at 100 bogomips and it has 64M of RAM.Mounting is slow. ls is slow. I got it to store media files but I find I can't play mp3s from it unless I tell my player to cache the whole song (and forget about crossfade). It came with telnetd running and no ssh, but fortunately it was based on Debian Woody so fixes are easy. And boy has it required a number of fixes.
I'm thinking of doing something like you did--copying critical configuration info off of it and reusing its md in a faster x86 box.
Anti-Spam laws are bad. His freedom (or lack thereof) is your freedom. A technical solution to spam is superior.
True. Do you have any suggestions? As an advocate of libertarian-socialist type society/economics I would dearly like to be able to tell people approxamently what I think without needing to write them a book
That's fine, except that I said episode 12.
As it happens I misread the OP so my comments are off base.
But nevertheless, the objections stand. WRT why the other site is implicitly better... it's the same reason I'd call a the GIMP better than Photoshop. It may not actually surupass it yet, but the openness makes it all worthwhile.
Let's take 24 for instance, that show started in 2001 (old enough for you?).
/does not know/! What;s more, I found that half the links in the Buffy articles linked to Charmed. WTF?
No. Find a review of Blake's 7 episode 3.
Now, tell me which episodes of Dr. Who have been lost in entirity, and also list which Hartnell episodes are only partly available.
Both of these things wre dead easy on TV tome and cannot be done on TV.com.
What if I want to check continuity between episodes of Thundercats? Show me that on tv.com.
Now, qyuickly! You will be timed: What was the significant event in Buffy season 6 episode 12?! Go go go! With tvtome I could have looked this up (given my broadband) in under 60 seconds. TV.com
I know you meant 5 1/4.
Anyway, I hooked one into my system for a while and ripped images of old DOS disks I had lying around so as to presere them for the future. But one day I turned the power to my system back on after an outage and there was a flash of light, white smoke and the sweet smell of burnt silicon. The only thing that fried was the 5 1/4 floppy drive, so I count myself lucky.
When composing an email in Thunderbird in Windows, I'm accustomed to highlighting a URL then pressing CTRL-L and ENTER rapidly to create a hyperlink. In Linux, that doesn't work because the CTRL-L dialog box doesn't come up fast enough.
This is entirely because of GTK2 and pango. GTK2 is slow, pango is *realy* slow. If those can be optimized or replaced most GUI-speed issues would clear up (at least in GTK apps).
I was under the impression that X's slowness was due to it's aging and impossible-to-change-without-a-complete-rewrite client/server architecture.
:0.0 and see if that makes a difference.
This is a common misconception. In fact the biggest problem with X, until recently, was the glacially slow pace of develoment. This problem is essentially solved now since it was almost entirely due to the XFree86 people (and they are, thankfully, no longer in charge).
The client/server architecture of X actually causes essentially zero performance problems when the display and video card are on the same machine. You may have your DISPLAY setting set to localhost:0.0 and that may be causing X to use TCP instead of local domain sockets (but probably not). If it is, set it to
Also, try changing your WMs settings, switching your WM, updating/tweaking your driver, or getting a non-crappy video card. Any of these may solve your problem
Previous slashdot discussions of X (see any story about Y-Windows) have generated massively detailed threads where experts have explained why X is not fundamentally broken. I wont try to regurgitate that stuff here since I'd only do it badly. You are free to go look...
Which is great unless you're running testing or unstable. With testing you can get away with it if it's not a cirical production machine (ie, you can aford to have it broken for a few hours nw and then) but if it's anything but an experimental box that's suicide with sid.
aptitude -t stable upgrade is much safer. However, if you run a mix of newer software from e.g. sid you could find yourself downgraded.